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Beyond Antagonizing Settlers: On Demonized Muslims and Vilified Jews

Joyce Dalsheim

in Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli Settlement Project

The case of antagonizing settlers in Israel resonates with the appearance of broader divisions between liberalism and religiosity, in particular with representations of a stark division between Islam ... More

The case of antagonizing settlers in Israel resonates with the appearance of broader divisions between liberalism and religiosity, in particular with representations of a stark division between Islam and the West. This chapter considers the implications of this study beyond the Israeli context, asking what kinds of questions and challenges it poses for scholarly interventions into contemporary issues of religious/secular conflict. Dalsheim engages with the work of Saba Mahmood, Judith Butler, and Talal Asad, each of whom adresses Western reactions to Muslims or attempts to intervene in their lives, and each of whom is critical of inconsistencies in liberal thought and practice. This chapter argues that applying these theories to the case of Israeli settlers means pondering the implications of a moral imperative to recognize not only currently demonized Muslims but also the implications of recognizing the humanity of currently vilified Jewish settlers.Less

Letter from ῾Abd Allāh b. As῾ad

Petra M. Sijpesteijn

in Shaping a Muslim State: The World of a Mid-Eighth-Century Egyptian Official

This chapter presents a letter from ʽAbd Allāh b. ʽAsad to someone's whose patronymic, Khālid, only is preserved. ʽAbd Allāh informs him that Abūla, a scribe has come to him requesting that ʽAbd ... More

This chapter presents a letter from ʽAbd Allāh b. ʽAsad to someone's whose patronymic, Khālid, only is preserved. ʽAbd Allāh informs him that Abūla, a scribe has come to him requesting that ʽAbd Allāh passes on some demands from Abūla for leather and documents to the addressee. The letter ends with greetings and the remark that ʽAbd Allāh's family is well.Less

Humor in Dark Times

Lisa Wedeen

in Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria

Chapter two demonstrates the reliability and incompleteness of ideological reproduction by detailing how dramatic comedies operated ideologically among Syria’s citizenry under al-Asad’s emerging ... More

Chapter two demonstrates the reliability and incompleteness of ideological reproduction by detailing how dramatic comedies operated ideologically among Syria’s citizenry under al-Asad’s emerging market-oriented autocracy before the uprising. The chapter considers the work of Allayth Hajju, one of Syria’s best-known television directors, registering both the grim realities of the decade just past and the evident seductions of the neoliberal turn. At times uncannily prescient, at times poignantly bleak, Hajju’s comedy opens up alternatives to its own most conservative impulses, demonstrating the potency and unevenness of ideological saturation. Even his most biting comedy perpetuates an ideology of neoliberal autocracy, while also providing openings for an oppositional consciousness. Comedy expresses a struggle between desires for political reform and attachments to everyday conventions, as prefiguring solidarities in acts of disruption that are themselves ambiguous—and politically relevant for being so. Those solidarities congealed in the notably unambivalent humor of the uprising’s early days and have come to be refreshed in the open-ended, mini publics of the contemporary period. Monologues of young activists amid the devastation of 2016–2017 do more than suggest resilience; their capacities for mimicry, multiple registers of address, and embrace of uncertainty draw attention to future possibilities in past paths not taken.Less

Colonial Secularism and Islamism in North India: A Relationship of Creativity?

in Secularizing Islamists?: Jama'at-e-Islami and Jama'at-ud-Da'wa in Urban Pakistan

This chapter, which explores the origins of Islamism within the North Indian context, rests on Talal Asad's insight about the dialectical relationship between “secularism” and “religion.” It proposes ... More

This chapter, which explores the origins of Islamism within the North Indian context, rests on Talal Asad's insight about the dialectical relationship between “secularism” and “religion.” It proposes that the type of secularism which the British sought to impose in colonial India developed the possibility of novelty in Muslim thought and practice that is called Islamism. The particular kind of secularism that the British employed to the Indian context was one which developed severe hindrances to secularization. Maududi moved from Hyderabad to Jabalpore to Delhi in search of employment variously as a journalist/editor, tutor, and college lecturer. He and the Islamists were destablized by their insistence on the universalism of Islamic laws. Maududi's modernity was a source of contention with the traditionalists. His approach to religion and its practice translated into innovations at various levels, while building upon earlier vocabularies and “traditions” of reform.Less

Introduction: What We Talk About When We Talk about Secularism

Peter Coviello

in Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism

This chapter offers a genealogy of secularism as a mobile, many-voiced critical formulation. Surveying a wide archive of scholarship in and around the secularism concept, and offering up seven axioms ... More

This chapter offers a genealogy of secularism as a mobile, many-voiced critical formulation. Surveying a wide archive of scholarship in and around the secularism concept, and offering up seven axioms for the pursuit of post-secular critique, it argues that the salient distinction, under conditions of secularism, is not between religion and the non-religious but, more fundamentally, between good religion and bad belief; that this disciplinary distinction comes to be operationalized as a gendering, racializing biopolitics; and that we can best grasp secularism as the racialized theodicy of hegemonic liberalism.Less

On the Definition of Religion

William E. Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon

in The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of "Religion"

This chapter describes classical approaches to defining religion and attempts to classify them. Definitions are distinguished on the basis of their defining religious data in terms of some basic and ... More

This chapter describes classical approaches to defining religion and attempts to classify them. Definitions are distinguished on the basis of their defining religious data in terms of some basic and substantive essence, or in terms of their function and context. It argues that, in the end, most classic academic definitions of religion fail to demarcate consistently what they aim to demarcate. Following Asad, the explanation for this failure is found in the political nature of “religion” as a category.Less

Minority Rights in Syria

Joshua Castellino and Kathleen A. Cavanaugh

in Minority Rights in the Middle East

This chapter seeks to examine and analyse the history and legislative provisions to protect ‘minorities’ in Syria. It offers an explanation of how these can be identified in a state that has been ... More

This chapter seeks to examine and analyse the history and legislative provisions to protect ‘minorities’ in Syria. It offers an explanation of how these can be identified in a state that has been effectively ruled by a minority community, seeking to provide explanations and a context for this rule. A significant focus of the chapter lies on what we view as sectarian entrepreneurialism which plays a significant role in the events that played out in Syria in 2012. The identity politics that took root under Bashar Al-Asad provided a ready-made framework within which religious, social, and political divisions are articulated. Alawis, Druze, Palestinians (a majority of whom are Sunni) and Christians in Syria, whilst comprising a demographic minority, have either forged an uneasy alliance under Asad or have endeavoured to remain ‘neutral’.Less

Violence as Recognition, Recognition as Violence

Rebecca Gould

in Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus

This chapter examines transgressive sanctity's most recent iteration in wartime Chechnya. It focuses on local memories of Chechnya's first female suicide bombing in 2001. As it excavates the spaces ... More

This chapter examines transgressive sanctity's most recent iteration in wartime Chechnya. It focuses on local memories of Chechnya's first female suicide bombing in 2001. As it excavates the spaces of political life that remain unclarified by analyses grounded in the state, it draws on anthropological reflections on suicide bombing as a practice that aims at earthly immortality by Talal Asad and other theorists of secular modernity. It also explores how suicide bombing converges with and diverges from Hannah Arendt's reading of political life in antiquity as a striving for freedom from coercion. Even as it documents the post-Soviet recourse to violence in order to achieve recognition, the chapter seeks to reframe the anthropological concept of resistance. While much has been published concerning Chechen defiance of Russian rule, little has been written about the creative strategizing within coercive political systems that in Arabic is called ṣumīd (steadfastness) and yet permeates everyday life in the Caucasus. Ultimately, it is argued that the shift in the discourse of transgressive sanctity from text to image, and literature to mass media, to which the suicide bomber attests, harbingers this ideology's degeneration. In late post-Soviet modernity, violence has become aestheticized to the point of relinquishing its former power. At such a juncture, the state gains in power, because it is able to deploy force without being dependent on violence's aesthetic power.Less

Syria’s Alawis and the Ba’ath Party

Raymond Hinnebusch

in The Alawis of Syria: War, Faith and Politics in the Levant

This chapter frames the role of the Alawis within the context of the identity challenges of state formation in Syria. It examines the formation of Alawi political identity, their involvement in and ... More

This chapter frames the role of the Alawis within the context of the identity challenges of state formation in Syria. It examines the formation of Alawi political identity, their involvement in and impact on the rise of the Ba’ath Party, intra-Ba’ath politics and the consolidation of the Hafiz al-Asad regime. It also looks at the impact on the Alawis of the Muslim Brotherhood Uprising of the 1980s and the post 2011 Uprising against Bashar al-Asad. While the chapter highlights the Ba’ath regime's reliance on Alawi assabiyya which cost it legitimacy among the Sunni majority; yet its Alawi core allowed it to survive repeated assaults from domestic and external opposition. Reliance on the Ba’ath regime enabled the Alawis to break out of poverty and get privileged access to power and economic opportunity. But conversely, grievances against the regime tended to taint the whole community and, insofar as the regime alienated the majority Sunni community, it put the security of all Alawis at riskLess

Introduction: For ‘God, Syria, Bashar and Nothing Else’?

Michael Kerr

in The Alawis of Syria: War, Faith and Politics in the Levant

This chapter examines the principal themes addressed in detail and in depth by the contributors to this volume, highlighting the formative points in the Alawi community's contemporary experience in ... More

This chapter examines the principal themes addressed in detail and in depth by the contributors to this volume, highlighting the formative points in the Alawi community's contemporary experience in Syria, and analysing some of the challenges the Asad regime faced in its struggle to maintain power during 2011-14. Leading Syria experts present new perspectives on contemporary Alawi history, politics and sociology, analysing the Syrian state system, its political economy and governing elites, and the Alawi community's differing responses to the civil war which, to a large extent, have been overshadowed by the regime's focus on harnessing this community's fate to its own survival. Placing the contemporary Alawi experience in its historical context this volume offers readings of its journey from rural obscurity in late Ottoman times, political autonomy under the French Mandate system, migration and socio-economic development in independent Syria, the assumption of political supremacy under the leadership of former President Hafez al-Asad and his efforts to consolidate a secular Arab nationalist state, the unravelling of this state in the context of the recent Arab uprisings, and President Bashar al-Asad's approach to the early years of Syria's civil war.Less

Comparative Theology After Religion?

John J. Thatamanil

in Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity

This chapter employs genealogy of religion, critical race theory, and Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka Buddhism to call into question the way in which uninterrogated notions about “religion” and “religions” ... More

This chapter employs genealogy of religion, critical race theory, and Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka Buddhism to call into question the way in which uninterrogated notions about “religion” and “religions” compromise theologies of religious diversity. At the heart of the argument is the claim that both the categories “religions” and “races” were invented to reify traditions and peoples over against each other and to develop hierarchies of valuation. Reification is the precondition for ranking, and where there is reification there can be no learning. These reifications persist and complicate and compromise theologies of religious diversity and comparative theology. If Christian theology is to take up the project of interreligious learning, then a variety of extant theories of religion must be called into question. Nevertheless, the chapter concludes that there is no way to simply jettison “religion” and “religions.” These categories must be given new meaning.Less

Introduction

Irfan Ahmad

in Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace

It begins with a New York Times (2006) story about critique, reason, and religion. Situating the assumptions of that story in the relevant body of works –mainly but not limited to anthropology – the ... More

It begins with a New York Times (2006) story about critique, reason, and religion. Situating the assumptions of that story in the relevant body of works –mainly but not limited to anthropology – the Introduction lays out the four-fold argument the book enunciates. First, Western and the Enlightenment notion of critique is not critique per se but only one among several of its modalities like the Islamic one it foregrounds. The suggestion is to see Islam as critique; indeed, Islam as permanent critique. Second, in and of itself reason is neither sufficient nor autonomous in arriving at judgements. Third, the truncated reason of Cartesian cogito does not resonate well with the Islamic conception of reason that is much broader, nondualistic, and holistic. Fourth, critique ought not to be the sole preserve of salaried professional intellectuals; nonintellectuals too enact and participate in critique. The Introduction mounts a critique of Indian liberalism – exemplified, inter alia, by Amartya Sen, Partha Chatterjee and Ramchandra Guha –for its servility to nationalism and silencing of Muslim thoughts. Showing flaws in conflating political with epistemological borders, the book outlines the path to track the silenced Muslim tradition of critique across the recent, imperially planted borders of the nation-state.Less

Becoming Catholic: Education, Evangelization, and Conversion

Matthew J. Cressler

in Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration

This chapter argues that in order to fully understand why African Americans converted to Catholicism, it is important to avoid functionalist answers that attempt to reduce conversion to a choice on ... More

This chapter argues that in order to fully understand why African Americans converted to Catholicism, it is important to avoid functionalist answers that attempt to reduce conversion to a choice on the part of the convert and instead attend to the many overlapping practices, pressures, experiences, and relationships that shaped the process of becoming someone new. Intervening in debates in theories of religion, it further argues that scholars should take seriously the claims made by Black Catholics that “faith” made them Catholic, which should then lead scholars to consider what conditions make faith possible in the first place. It discusses “the Chicago Plan,” devised by Fr. Martin Farrell and Fr. Joseph Richards, in which missionary priests and sisters explicitly linked the enrollment of non-Catholic children in Catholic schools with mandatory religious education of the family in order to promote the conversion of African Americans. It then explores in depth the inner lives of African American children and parents in Catholic schools who became Catholic as they learned new ways of living in and experiencing the world.Less

Secular Bewilderment

in Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry

This chapter discusses the results of an ethnographic fieldwork which investigated the ways the literary (specifically poetry) has evolved as a playing field of the secular. It shows how secularism ... More

This chapter discusses the results of an ethnographic fieldwork which investigated the ways the literary (specifically poetry) has evolved as a playing field of the secular. It shows how secularism was profoundly assumed in the ways Arabic poets in general, and Palestinian poets in particular, sought to modernize their tradition and make it relevant to their world. The modernizing poets' narratives—their “embedded philosophies”—most immediately resonate with secularism as a political doctrine of separation when they express its typical demand for detaching religion from politics. In transforming poetic concepts and practices, the secular in modern Arabic poetry has not only banished the religious but has also come to depend on it. This chapter examines Talal Asad's (2003) concept of the secular as a modern form of power and looks at the particular practices and concepts surrounding the techniques with which poets handle sound in their compositions.Less

The Poiein of Secular Criticism

Stathis Gourgouris

in Lessons in Secular Criticism

Traces the origins of the notion of “secular criticism’” from Edward Said’s invention to the developments of comparative literature as a field of critical knowledge. Links the capacity for critique ... More

Traces the origins of the notion of “secular criticism’” from Edward Said’s invention to the developments of comparative literature as a field of critical knowledge. Links the capacity for critique to radical invention and political decision. Disputes the notion that critique is neutral, and argues that it forms part of the process of radical poiesis.Less

Introduction

Joel Blecher

in Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary across a Millennium

This chapter invites the reader in with an anecdote from a contemporary hadith commentary session with Na’im al-Irqsusi in Damascus, prior to the revolution that became a civil war. It then offers an ... More

This chapter invites the reader in with an anecdote from a contemporary hadith commentary session with Na’im al-Irqsusi in Damascus, prior to the revolution that became a civil war. It then offers an overview of the hadith commentary tradition from the classical period to the present, with special attention to the interpretation of Sahih al-Bukhari, one of the most renowned compilations of hadith. Combining methods from social theorists and philosophers—in particular Bourdieu, MacIntyre, and Asad—the chapter then poses the problem animating the project of this book and discusses how it will contribute to ongoing conversations in a number of fields, including hadith studies, commentary studies, social theory, and intellectual history.Less

Modern Visions of Secularism

Ali Mirsepassi

in Democracy in Modern Iran: Islam, Culture, and Political Change

This chapter analyzes the theory of secularism and the secular by Talal Asad, arguing that Asad's analysis provides a great range of new insights into the problems and limits of the secular as a ... More

This chapter analyzes the theory of secularism and the secular by Talal Asad, arguing that Asad's analysis provides a great range of new insights into the problems and limits of the secular as a specific political tradition and way of being with respect to non-Western and particularly Islamic societies. Yet Asad's rejection of secularism is problematic, and in fact the politics of secularism have become an important part of national democratic struggles in Middle Eastern and Islamic societies. Part of that struggle involves understanding the significance of secularism in a more complex and nuanced way. Asad writes that, “because the secular is so much a part of our modern life, it is not easy to grasp it directly [it is] best pursued through its shadows.”Less

On the Origins of Corporate Culture

Kathryn Lofton

in Consuming Religion

This chapter offers a history of the concept of “corporate culture.” It begins and concludes with the 2008 financial crisis because respondents to the crisis suggested it was the result of a culture ... More

This chapter offers a history of the concept of “corporate culture.” It begins and concludes with the 2008 financial crisis because respondents to the crisis suggested it was the result of a culture problem. As they emerged from years of fines, layoffs, and reported losses, American bankers repeatedly told their customers that they were working to prevent another crisis through an improvement in their culture. Arguing that corporate culture emerged as a way to humanize the increasing role of corporations in American life, this chapter exposes the anthropological origins and persistent effects of diagnosing “culture” in US corporate life.Less

Introduction

Moshe Sluhovsky

in Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism

The book deals with two major debates in anthropology, religious studies,and history. One is the relationship between religious practices and religious beliefs and whether belief is a useful term in ... More

The book deals with two major debates in anthropology, religious studies,and history. One is the relationship between religious practices and religious beliefs and whether belief is a useful term in discussions of religious matters. The other is the issue of constructions of modern forms of subjecthood and the mechanisms of control and subjugation that characterize modernity. Drawing on a large number of theoretical debates in a number of fields, the introduction locates the book within a scholarly setting.Less